Press

“Unfortunately, most developers might not know … how intrusive a given SDK can be when building their own software, while users are completely unaware of the fact that, when running a mobile app, there might be dozens of other organizations potentially collecting sensitive and personal data,” said Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, a research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute’s Networking and Security division and a member of the team that developed Lumen, an app that monitors which SDKs your phone is transmitting data to.

“Huawei of course has the capability [to spy and steal secrets] but Huawei can say with a straight face that there’s no evidence of them having used the capability,” says Nicholas Weaver, staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, University of California, Berkeley. “Countries with 5G have a choice: Go with Huawei and let China have an easy mode [to access telco networks.] Or go with European competitors and spend more money.”

Serge Egelman, a research director at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute noted that "From the user’s perspective, there’s literally no way of preventing it from happening or even knowing when it’s happening.” The expectation “that app users should be able to figure this all out and manage it is absolutely ludicrous.”

This month Avast artificial intelligence researcher Sadia Afroz will explain to San Francisco conference goers at Enigma 2020 how to build robust machine learning systems to defend against real-world attacks. In a paper written with Avast’s head of AI Rajarshi Gupta, Afroz calls for new industry-wide consistency in cybersecurity. “We need a systematic approach to model the adversary of a machine learning system in security. Different papers using different incomparable adversaries make it hard to track progress in this area.” A research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute at UC-Berkeley (ICSI), Afroz works with the Avast team of data scientists and threat researches from the world’s top schools including Berkeley, Stanford, MIG and Charles University. and Avast Software. Avast’s user base of over 435 million makes up one of the world’s largest threat detection networks, allowing us to build the best machine learning models and stop cyberthreats before they do harm.